Bill Gates Trivia
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47 free Bill Gates trivia questions with answers — technology quiz, new questions added Sep 2026.
Bill Gates wrote his first program, a game of tic-tac-toe, on a Teletype bought with proceeds from a school rummage sale. He got banned from a computer company's mainframe for exploiting bugs, scored 1590 on the SAT, solved a pancake-sorting problem at Harvard that stood for 30 years, and told MITS he had a BASIC interpreter for the Altair before writing a line of it. Microsoft followed, then the IBM deal, Windows, the richest-man-in-the-world years and the largest private foundation on earth. This Bill Gates trivia quiz runs 47 questions across his life and work: Seattle and Lakeside, Kent Evans and Paul Allen, Traf-O-Data, Harvard and Steve Ballmer, Albuquerque and the Open Letter to Hobbyists, 86-DOS and Tim Paterson, the 1986 IPO, the 1998 antitrust deposition, Melinda French and the Lānaʻi wedding, Xanadu 2.0, the Codex Leicester, the Giving Pledge, TerraPower, farmland, the Presidential Medal of Freedom, Time Persons of the Year, Source Code and more. Easy questions come first; the last third is for people who remember Ric Weiland. Every answer is verified against Wikipedia's biography of Gates, with the supporting sentence quoted under each question. Fans of this quiz should also try our Microsoft and tech billionaires quizzes.
30 of 47 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01What hit Gates in the face as he arrived for a meeting in Brussels in 1998?
A cream pie
A cream pie, thrown by the crew of Belgian prankster Noël Godin, who made a career of ambushing the powerful with pastry. Gates was his most famous target.
Q 02Gates was born in 1955 in which city?
Seattle
Seattle, where a rare tornado threw the carport over the Gates family home in 1962, a month before Bill turned seven.
Q 03William Henry Gates III grew up answering to which family nickname?
Trey
Trey, a card player's word for a three, marked him as William Henry Gates III. His father was William H. Gates II.
Q 04Gates's parents originally wanted him to pursue which career?
Law
Law: his father was a prominent attorney, and Gates entered Harvard in 1973 as a pre-law student before computing took over.
Q 05At which private school did Gates meet his future co-founder and start programming?
Lakeside
Lakeside, where the Mothers' Club spent rummage-sale money on a Teletype terminal and computer time, and a 13-year-old Gates got hooked.
Q 06Gates's first computer program was an implementation of which game?
Tic-tac-toe
Tic-tac-toe, written in BASIC at 13 on a school Teletype linked to a General Electric computer, let classmates play against the machine.
Q 07What got the teenage Gates and his friends banned from Computer Center Corporation's PDP-10 for a summer?
Exploiting bugs for free time
Exploiting bugs for free time earned the schoolboys a summer ban, but the company then traded them computer hours for hunting down its bugs.
Q 08How did Kent Evans, Gates's best friend and first business partner, die in their junior year?
A mountain climbing accident
A mountain climbing accident on Mount Shuksan killed Evans at 17 in May 1972, while the pair were writing their school's class-scheduling program.
Q 09Before Microsoft, Gates and Paul Allen ran which company as teenagers?
Traf-O-Data
Traf-O-Data processed traffic-counter data for local governments and earned the pair about $20,000.
Q 10Which notoriously hard Harvard course did Gates take?
Math 55
Math 55, which Harvard's own math department has called probably the most difficult undergraduate math class in the country. Gates got through it, then dropped out in his junior year.
Q 11Gates's Harvard-era algorithm for which combinatorics problem stood as the best known for about 30 years?
Pancake sorting
Pancake sorting: getting a jumbled stack into size order using only flips of a spatula. His professor posed it in class as an unsolved puzzle, and Gates, then a sophomore, came back with a faster method a day or two later.
Q 12Which 1975 machine, featured in Popular Electronics, prompted Gates and Allen to start their company?
MITS Altair 8800
MITS Altair 8800: they told its maker they already had a BASIC for it before writing a line, then wrote one within weeks without an Altair of their own to test it on.
Q 13Microsoft began life not in Seattle but in which desert city?
Albuquerque
Q 21At 31, Gates became the youngest person up to that time to do what?
Become a billionaire
Become a billionaire: Microsoft's shares, first sold to the public in 1986, climbed so fast that his stake passed $1 billion within about a year.
Q 22To show off a machine his foundation funded, Gates drank a glass of water that had recently been what?
Human sewage
Human sewage: the Omniprocessor boils sludge, burns the dried solids for power and purifies the steam. Gates said the water tasted as good as any he had had from a bottle.
Q 23Who succeeded Gates as Microsoft CEO in 2000?
Steve Ballmer
Albuquerque, New Mexico, where its first customer built kit computers. Microsoft only came home to the Seattle area around the start of 1979, settling in Bellevue.
Q 14Which 1980s teen-movie star played Gates in a 1999 TV film about Microsoft and Apple?
Anthony Michael Hall
Anthony Michael Hall, who played Brian, the brainy one in detention in The Breakfast Club. Asked about the film years later, Gates called the portrayal "reasonably accurate".
Q 15Gates's 1976 Open Letter to Hobbyists was an early public complaint about what?
Software piracy
Software piracy: Gates, then 20, wrote that only about one in ten hobbyists running Microsoft's BASIC had paid for it, and told the rest bluntly that they were stealing.
Q 16Who mentioned Microsoft to IBM's John Opel in 1980, shortly before IBM chose it for the PC?
Gates's mother
Gates's mother: Mary Gates sat on the national United Way board with Opel, who reportedly put in a good word for her son's small firm with his executives.
Q 17When IBM first asked about an operating system, Gates referred them to which company?
Digital Research
Digital Research, whose CP/M was the leading operating system for small computers. When those talks went nowhere, Microsoft bought a lookalike from a small Seattle firm and licensed that to IBM instead.
Q 18Which Microsoft product began life as another firm's Quick and Dirty Operating System?
MS-DOS
MS-DOS: Microsoft bought the program from a small hardware firm and adapted it for the IBM PC, but kept the right to sell it to other computer makers. When IBM clones flooded the market, most of them ran it.
Q 19Gates's co-founder left Microsoft in early 1983 after being diagnosed with what?
Hodgkin lymphoma
Hodgkin lymphoma, a cancer of the lymph system. Allen recovered after treatment and kept his seat on Microsoft's board, but never went back to a day job there.
Q 20When Steve Jobs accused him of copying the Mac, Gates said both had robbed a "rich neighbor" named what?
Xerox
Xerox, whose Palo Alto lab pioneered the mouse-and-icons screen. Gates said he had broken in to steal the TV set, only to find that Jobs had already taken it.
Steve Ballmer, his old Harvard dorm-mate, who had joined Microsoft in 1980. Gates stayed on as chairman and gave himself a new title, chief software architect.
Q 24Gates stepped down as Microsoft chairman in 2014 to become technology adviser to which new CEO?
Satya Nadella
Satya Nadella, who asked the founder to give Microsoft more of his time, not less. Gates said the move would let him spend over a third of his time with the product groups.
Q 25With which lawyer did Gates split hairs over the meaning of everyday words in his 1998 antitrust deposition?
David Boies
David Boies, the government's trial lawyer. When the videotape was played in court, Judge Thomas Penfield Jackson laughed out loud and shook his head.
Q 26Gates met Melinda French, a newly hired Microsoft product manager, on a 1987 work trip to which city?
New York
New York, where she went to a business dinner and ended up sitting next to her new chief executive.
Q 27Bill and Melinda Gates married in 1994 on the 12th hole of a golf course on which Hawaiian island?
Lānaʻi
Lānaʻi: to keep the press away, Gates reportedly booked every room at the island's Manele Bay Hotel and hired every helicopter on neighbouring Maui.
Q 28Gates's high-tech mansion is nicknamed Xanadu 2.0 after the palatial estate in which classic film?
Citizen Kane
Citizen Kane, where Xanadu is the newspaper tycoon's vast estate. Newly married, Melinda balked at moving in to the Gates version, with its trampoline room and banks of screens, and hired a new architect to redesign it.
Q 29In 1994 Gates paid $30.8 million at auction for the Codex Leicester, a notebook by whom?
Leonardo da Vinci
Leonardo da Vinci's notebook had been renamed the Codex Hammer by its previous owner, the industrialist Armand Hammer. Rather than call it the Codex Gates, its new owner gave it back its older name.
Q 30The ceiling of Gates's home library is engraved with a quotation from which novel?
The Great Gatsby
The Great Gatsby: the line is about a dream so close its hero could hardly fail to grasp it. When they were dating, Melinda switched on a green light in her office, like the one on Daisy's dock, to signal that Gates could visit.